ner she rambled on, gravely and communicatively,
contradicting herself at times; not talking fast (she never did), but
dropping one simple sentence, with an interval, after the other, with
a certain richness of voice which always was part of the charm of her
presence. She wished to be convinced against herself, and it was a
comfort to her to hear herself argue. I was quite willing to be part
of the audience, though I had to confine myself to very superficial
remarks; for when I had said the event I feared would kill Miss
Bernardstone I had said everything that was open to me. I had nothing
to do with Lady Vandeleur's marrying, apart from that I probably
disappointed her. She had caught a glimpse of the moral beauty of
self-sacrifice, of a certain ideal of conduct (I imagine it was rather
new to her), and would have been glad to elicit from me, as a person
of some experience of life, an assurance that such joys are not
insubstantial. I had no wish to wind her up to a spiritual ecstasy from
which she would inevitably descend again, and I let her deliver herself
according to her humor, without attempting to answer for it that she
would find renunciation the road to bliss. I believed that if she should
give up Mr. Tester she would suffer accordingly; but I did n't think
that a reason for not giving him up. Before I left her she said to me
that nothing would induce her to do anything that she did n't think
right. "It would be no pleasure to me, don't you see? I should be always
thinking that another way would have been better. Nothing would induce
me,--nothing, nothing!"

VIII.

She protested too much, perhaps, but the event seemed to show that she
was in earnest. I have described these two first visits of mine in some
detail, but they were not the only ones I paid her. I saw her several
times again, before she left town, and we became intimate, as London
intimacies are measured. She ceased to protest (to my relief, for it
made me nervous), she was very gentle, and gracious, and reasonable, and
there was something in the way she looked and spoke that told me that
for the present she found renunciation its own reward. So far, my
scepticism was put to shame; her spiritual ecstasy maintained itself.
If I could have foreseen then that it would maintain itself till the
present hour I should have felt that Lady Vandeleur's moral nature is
finer indeed than mine. I heard from her that Mr. Tester remained at his
father's, an